As you wrap up your Christmas
shopping, odds are you’ll find three little words on lots of labels: “Made in China.”

For those of us who believe in
free trade and free markets, there is nothing wrong, in and of itself, with the
tidal wave of Chinese goods represented by that ubiquitous phrase—that is,
unless there’s something wrong about the
system that produces those goods.

DisturbedThe upside of China’s light-speed transformation from a hermit kingdom into the
world’s factory floor includes cheaper goods and increased
prosperity on both sides of the Pacific: With U.S.-bound exports growing by
some 1,600 percent since the early 1990s, China’s
“capitalish” economy has expanded by almost 10 percent annually for a
quarter-century, enabling Beijing to lift some 500 million out of poverty.

Not
coincidentally, the U.S. is about
$70 billion richer each year because of the U.S.-China trade relationship: With
China open for business, Walmart operates 400 stores in 170 Chinese cities; McDonald’s
has 2,000 restaurants in China; and the top-selling car in China is the Ford
Focus. China’s $9-trillion GDP makes it one of the main pistons of the global
economy. Total U.S.-China trade tops $560 billion annually.

But there’s a downside to all
this—or more accurately, an ugly underside. China may engage in free-market
economics, but China’s people are not free.

In a country where people of all
faiths and no faith at all celebrate Christmas, we Americans are prone to
forget that there are places where governments are literally at war with
Christmas, or at least at war with what Christmas represents. One such place is
China.

This past summer, Beijing smothered a burgeoning religious-openness movement in
Wenzhou, a city in eastern China “known for its
relaxed ties between church and state,” as The
New York Times eports.

Too relaxed, it turns out.
Xia Baolong, a regional Communist Party leader, saw the 180-foot spire atop a
new Christian church and was “disturbed that a religious building, especially
one seen as representing a foreign belief, dominated the skyline,” according to
the Times. So, government authorities
bulldozed the newly-built church and then ordered a dozen other churches in the
region to remove their crosses or face demolition.

Importantly, Xia is a close
ally of Xi Jinping, China’s newly-minted president. Although Western reporters are charmed by what Reuters
calls a “folksy smile,” it pays to recall
that Xi was a central part of the regime’s policies long before he became
president—policies that, according to the U.S. government, include the harshest
crackdown on dissent since the early 2000s.

The U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) provides some details: “The Chinese government continues to
perpetrate particularly severe violations of religious freedom…Inde­pendent
Catholics and Protestants face arrests, fines and the shuttering of their
places of worship.” Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, practi­tioners of Falun
Gong, folk religionists and Protestant house-church attenders “face long jail
terms, forced renun­ciations of faith and torture in detention…Protestants and
Catholics who refuse to join the state-sanctioned religious organizations
continue to face severe restrictions, including efforts to undermine and harass
their leaders, arrest and detentions, and property destruction.”

Amnesty International estimates that “hundreds of thousands of people” are subjected to
arbitrary arrest and detention in China, many of them for “peacefully
exercising their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of belief.”

Perhaps worst of all, some of those targeted for their religious beliefs
and political views end up in labor camps that double as factories. The
Laogai Research Foundation (LRF) identified 1,100 prison-labor camps in its
2005-06 report, concluding that there are “11 prisons that produce toys for domestic
and international markets.” According to LRF founder Harry Wu, himself a
survivor of the laogai camps, “It
is very likely that some of the toys are entering the United States.”

In fact, a U.S. government commission focused on human rights in China reports that “prison
labor has been used to manufacture, among other products, toys, electronics and
clothing. The export to the United States of products manufactured through the
use of forced labor in China’s prison system and other forms of detention
reportedly continues despite U.S.-China agreements.”

DesperateThe desperation of the people locked away in these camps (and their connection
to us) was brought to light in 2012, when an Oregon womanfound a note inside a box of Halloween decorations she purchased at Kmart. The
note begged its recipient to “resend this letter to the World Human Right (sic)
Organization …thousands here who are under persicution (sic) of the Chinese
Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.” The letter
claimed to be from “unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in
Shenyang, China.”

The woman was skeptical, but she
notified a human-rights NGO and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Agency. It turns out the letter was written by a man who had indeed been jailed
at the Masanjia prison-labor camp. His crime: practicing the outlawed Falun
Gong faith.

This is the ugly underside of
free trade without conscience.

There is a brutal logic to
Beijing’s brutal response to independent religious activity. After all, the
common denominator of these faiths—Christianity, Islam, Falun Gong, Tibetan
Buddhism—is that each holds there is something higher, something beyond, something
bigger than the state. That notion represents a mortal threat to the legitimacy
and durability of the People’s Republic of China, which is founded on the
premise that people exist to serve the state—not to glorify God.

In late
2013, Beijing announced it would be closing its network of “reeducation through labor” prison camps. But this proved to be a
case of word games. While the name may have changed, the system remains.

“The net effect of this policy shift was unclear,” the
U.S. government commission concludes, “as reports emerged that authorities
increased the use of other facilities, such as ‘legal education centers’ and compulsory
drug-detox centers, to arbitrarily detain citizens.”

DamagedSo what can we do?

We can access a vast arsenal of tools to become better
informed about China’s factories. The Department of Labor maintains a listing of
goods—categorized by country of origin—produced by child labor or forced labor.
China is flagged for everything from artificial flowers to toys. Free2Work helps people track how their favorite brands “are
working to address forced and child labor.” The group is even developing a
mobile app to empower consumers to trace supply chains. But Beijing doesn’t make it easy. Beijing has evaded efforts to trace
the source of some Chinese exports by hiding prison-labor products within a
labyrinth of front organizations. In the case of a prison in Jieyang, for
example, goods were sent from the camp to an import-export corporation in mainland
China, then to one of four holding companies in Hong Kong, and then placed on
the global market.

We can check the label. The good
news is that a growing number of companies are striving to keep their shelves
free of merchandise produced by forced labor. Free2Work grades dozens of clothing companies, and the Web abounds with
lists of ethical
retailers.

We can
challenge our elected representatives to make human rights a priority. “The average American needs to tell the media, their
congressman and senators, and the president that we have to put human rights
and democracy on the table with the Chinese government,” Wu says. “We should
not only want to see their economy improve, but also their human rights and
freedom.”

Toward that end, we can stop buying products bearing the
“Made in China” label. A broad U.S. boycott of goods produced and/or assembled
in China would certainly get Beijing’s attention, but that’s easier said than
done. On average, each man, woman and child in America accounts for $1,393 in
Chinese imports annually. I’ve tried my own personal boycott, and it’s a
herculean—or perhaps more accurately, Sisyphean—effort to avoid those three
little words. (The next time you’re at Target or Walmart, load your cart with
what you need, and then remove anything that was made in China.) Moreover,
boycotting Chinese-made goods may do collateral damage to unintended targets:
First, “Made in China” does not necessarily mean “Made in Prison.” Indeed, millions
of Chinese people are making better lives for
themselves by working—at their own volition—in factories that produce U.S.-bound
goods. Second, 55
cents of every dollar spent on a “Made in China” item pays for services
produced in the United States.

Still, China’s
government—along with the system under which the Chinese people live and
work—is brutal and unjust, which means we need to do something. We can pray for
an end to China’s tyranny, for wisdom for our leaders as they deal with
Beijing, for eyes and hearts to see what’s happening, for the courage and
compassion to act, and especially for those who are not free. As Hebrews 13:3 pleads,we are “to remember those in prison as
if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if
you yourselves were suffering.”

Dowd writes a monthly column exploring the crossroads of faith and public policy for byFaith.